Chris Harris's Blog Archive: April 2011

April was a sad month. It was
the first time Mothers Day came around without my Mum. We lost Lis Sladen,
too - which put even more of a damper on the new series of Dr Who than
killing the main character off in the first ten minutes had managed to
do.

But there were positive things afoot, too - multiple rumours about the
Higgs boson, SpaceX announcing they were planning a mission to Mars, and
I got to see a whole bunch of fine movies.

Folk are still commenting on the Boing Boing handwriting story. While
it makes for depressing reading, it hasn't taught me anything new. The
same story crops up every few years; I found an
almost identical thread from 2006 over at Techdirt. Six months before
that, on the 14th
February I'd blogged about a
Guardian article on the same subject (and the month before that, I'd
blogged about a decline
in reasoning skills - some things never change). Time magazine ran
a story about The
Death of Handwriting in 2009 which trotted out exactly the same tropes.
So I did what I always do in such circumstances - I went online to see
what scientific studies I could find about the subject.

The bad news is that there aren't that many which explicitly address
cursive handwriting as a factor in encouraging cognitive development.
I also hit problems because, even when I searched explicitly for references
to "handwriting", Google wasn't all that great at distinguishing
between the act of using a pen to put marks on paper and the more general
practice of writing, i.e. stringing words together in order to create
a piece of text. However, I did find some articles which discussed the
efficacy of handwriting practice in developing fine motor control in young
children. A study published in the journal Learning Disability Quarterly
found amongst other things that fourth and sixth graders
wrote
more complete sentences with a pen than they did with a keyboard,
but I must admit that as they wanted five bucks for the privilege of reading
their findings, I haven't read the entire paper. The web page that mentions
it has a lovely quote from Umberto Eco on handwriting, though:

“…writing by hand obliges us to compose the phrase mentally
before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it
does make one slow down and think… The art of handwriting teaches
us to control our hands and encourages hand-eye coordination.”

The comments made in the Boing Boing thread suggest that learning to
write cursive text is hard - so hard, in fact, that many people never
achieve mastery. Just being able to write legibly and coherently is difficult
enough. Ronald Kellogg's paper on writing
skills and cognitive development confirms this with the first sentence:

“Learning how to write a coherent, effective text is a difficult
and protracted
achievement of cognitive development that contrasts sharply with the
acquisition of speech.”

"I don't need to be able to write neatly if I always use a keyboard,"
the Boing Boing commenters say. Maybe so, but that's not the point. Castro-Caldas,
Petersson, Reis, Stone-Elander and Ingvar established that learning
to read and write during childhood influences the functional development
of the adult human brain. What's really interesting is that writing in
different ways actually appears to engage different parts of the brain:
Google books threw up a number of interesting references, including a
tantalising reference in Writing
in Focus by Florian Coulmas and Konrad Ehlich to the idea that rapid,
non-figurative tasks and more accurate, symbolic activities engage two
semi-independent motor systems. If that doesn't describe the difference
between scribbled notes and flowing handwriting, I don't know what does.
I found that intriguing enough to order a copy of the book, so when it
arrives you can be sure that I'll blog about this whole issue again.

On a more basic level, a study mentioned in the Journal of Educational
Psychology echoed Umberto Eco, asserting that without the assistance of
the cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop functionality of a computer word processing
package, students have to plan
what they are going to write in advance and monitor their performance
more closely as they commit pen to paper. In other words, handwriting
engages cognitive skills that are not deployed when we sit at the keyboard
and type: students given additional instruction in writing "produced
essays that were longer, contained more mature vocabulary, and were qualitatively
better" than those in a control group.

Finally, Fitzgerald
and Shanahan discuss the role in which reading and writing play in
cognitive development, taking as their start point the suggestion that
cognitive processes are shared between both activities:

“…reading and writing are constellations of cognitive processes
that depend on knowledge representations at various linguistic levels
(phonemic, orthographic, semantic, syntactic, pragmatic). Reading and
writing are connected, according to such views, because they depend
on identical or similar knowledge representations, cognitive processes,
and contexts and contextual constraints.”

Not surprisingly, they found this to be the case, concluding that

“reading
and writing may be taught more effectively or efficiently together rather than delaying writing
instruction until reading development is completed, as was the historical
approach in American education.”

Although it is possible to separate one from the other (and that
this has already happened is evident from the comments being made at
Boing Boing), neglect in developing one skill has a deleterious
effect on the acquisition of the other. It's sad to see how many
people don't regard this as a problem.

Apparently there's been some big function going on in London today. The
television has not been on and I've avoided the radio. Instead, I've been
listening to Frank Zappa albums and enjoying chilling out on a day off.

AWE-INSPIRING

I went to see Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten
Dreams this week and I've written up a review for your edification
and enlightenment. Or something.

INFLAMMATORY FOR THE SAKE OF IT

I've been a regular reader of the Boing Boing blog for many years, but
in recent weeks it seems to have adopted the Daily Mail approach to web
presence - making distinctly contentious assertions in stories in order
to provoke outrage amongst the denizens of the web, who all pile in to
the website which then gets massive spikes in its readership as a result.
I'm not certain the first time was entirely intentional, given that Xeni
actually tweeted about unleashing a FULL-ON
TITTIES WAR thanks to her story about suppression
of images of topless women in Thailand, but a lot of what the blog's
been covering this week seems designed to push the wrong sort of geek
buttons; Superman
renouncing his American citizenship is a good example. The latest
one happened today, in which Maggie Koerth-Baker asserted that cursive
script is no longer necessary. I couldn't let that one pass without
throwing my 2d-worth into the ring...

Contentiousness is a powerful driver of web hits, obviously. Since I
posted the link to that image, it's been viewed over 70 times on Flickr.
I get the distinct impression that I'm in the minority as far as comments
in the Boing Boing thread go; the majority of remarks can be crystallised
down to "I don't write neatly, good riddance to it." If I was
in a snarky mood I'd point out how many of the comments denigrating the
idea of developing a personal style of neat handwriting also contain spelling
mistakes, and how those posts supporting cursive tend to be more coherent
and well-structured. That's bound to be just a coincidence, right?

It's International They
Might Be GiantsAwareness
Day! Four
tracks from the new album are released on iTunes today, and I'm going
to see them at the Latitude Festival in July! I'm a big
fan!! How many exclamation points do I have to use before my excitement
is adequately conveyed?!!?!

WAY TO GO

Elon Musk's SpaceX have a new goal:
to put
a man on Mars by 2020. And when they talk about "a man"
I'm betting they mean Elon Musk himself, who told The Guardian last year
he was planning on retiring
there. Wow.

The new series of Doctor Who kicked off yesterday, and did so with one
of the most shocking moments I think I've ever seen on the show since
it started. I'm not going to say what happened in case you haven't seen
the episode yet, but I've now watched it twice, I've been thinking about
it for twenty four hours, and I still can't decide if it's the most inspired
bit of writing ever or the most damaging thing anyone has ever done to
the show.

Yes, it's one or the other, but I don't know which. I don't know, and
I'm worried.

Until the plot development - and that's all I'll refer to it as - is
eventually resolved I don't have enough to go on to make a judgment. I'm
concerned, though. On Dr Who Confidential last night, Steven Moffat was
explicit: the plot development is exactly what it appears to be, and the
results are exactly what the characters are told during the episode. The
message is clear.

And that's what worries me. Because, even if we know that at some point
in the Doctor's future the plot development is going to take place, we
shouldn't be shown it. Because however dramatic it may be, it imposes
huge constraints on the future of the show. Even five minutes' thought
will bring up one glaringly obvious one, which for the sake of spoiler
avoidance I'm just going to describe as a future casting issue.

But more than that, the plot development means the show has to deal with
issues that, while inescapable, aren't particularly germane to a show
that is aimed so strongly at children. I'd be interested to know what
folks with younger children thought about letting their kids watch last
night's episode. There is a basic assumption with the audience that they'll
see stuff that is scary, yes, and that might give more sensitive children
nightmares. But I found the plot development profoundly upsetting, and
I'm sure small children did too. I think it's a misjudgement of the core
audience, and I think that unless the plot development is resolved
in a reassuring and positive way, it could end up destroying the show
by trying to turn it into something that it's not and should never be;
can you imagine the outcry if someone took Scooby Doo and tried
turning it into Buffy, for instance? Oh wait, they did that, didn't
they? And it stank, didn't it?

If it was anyone else writing the episode, I'd throw my hands up in disgust,
mutter something along the lines of "they haven't thought the implications
through" and throw away much of the emotional investment I've had
in the show for much of the last forty-odd years. If it was anyone else
in charge of the show, the plot development would probably end up with
me returning to the "take it or leave it" approach I had to
the show in the McCoy years, when I started occasionally missing entire
episodes and ended up doing other things on Saturdays altogether. But
with Steven Moffat in charge, I'm not ready to do that yet. Because I'm
expecting him to pull something even more extraordinary out of the bag
to provide a resolution. There are enough little clues in the first episode
to make me think it's possible: River's line of "No, of course not"
after she empties her revolver; a couple of shots of the Doctor looking
pensive for no apparent reason; an exchange of dialogue between him and
someone else that we don't get to hear beyond "It's OK, I know it's
you." I've already got a theory about who "you" is, too
- although if I'm right, it could easily be a huge cop-out. Things are
pointing to the show taking a direction that, frankly, I don't think is
going to work. I hope I'm surprised. I'm worried I won't be. I know Moffat
is one of the best writers on TV and I believe he's capable of taking
my expectations and transcending them.

I had to stop and get out of the car on the way in to work yesterday.
The reason? As I drove down the access road to the office, there was a
mallard drake standing on one leg in the middle of the road. He obviously
had no intention of moving, either. A guy in a silver Toyota Celica was
leaving one of the other offices as I got out of the Z, and he was laughing
his head off at the whole spectacle of me chasing a duck down the road.
I guess it was pretty funny.

The rest of yesterday went OK, and the hack to and from Oxfordshire passed
without incident. I saw a couple of red kites, too. Although the traffic
on the M4 was bad in the afternoon, I was home before 6, and was delighted
to see that the roundabout construction at the top of the hill has been
suspended for the holidays. Result!

AND RELAX

It's Good Friday, and I've spent a quiet day by myself. By noon I'd done
some laundry, mowed the lawn, and extricated the barbecue from the garage.
It clouded over this afternoon but it's stayed dry. I cooked a couple
of burgers on the grill and they tasted great!

After the chores were done I spent the afternoon chilling out, but I've
stayed off the Playstation - it sounds like Sony have been having
problems over the last couple of days and anyway, I have plenty of
reading to catch up on. For a start, I'm making my way through Ben
Watson's epic essay on Frank Zappa, the
Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Aside from the occasional ad hominem
and strawman arguments, it's a fascinating look at Frank's career. It's
already prompted me to fill in a few of the gaps in my Zappa collection,
particularly the early albums. I first got in to Zappa around 1980, though
the first album of his that I really obsessed about was Ship
arriving too late to save a drowning witch which came out in 1982
and features a very young Steve Vai playing what Zappa's liner notes refer
to as "impossible guitar." The TV's on right now, though. The
BBC HD channel is showing Raiders of the Lost Ark and it looks very, very
good in high definition. So I think I might bring the blogging to a close,
uncork a bottle of wine and enjoy the rest of the movie. Whatever you're
doing, have a good evening!

I was so sad to hear that Elisabeth
Sladen died yesterday. It was during her tenure on Doctor Who that
I really got what the show was about, and went from being a regular
watcher to an enthusiastic fan. For all the Doctor's idiosyncrasies and
abilities, he remains an alien. It's the role of the companion to inject
some humanity into the proceedings and nobody on the show has ever done
it better than Sarah Jane Smith. The interplay between her and Jon Pertwee
(and then, best of all, with Tom Baker) was riveting, unmissable stuff.
The fourth Doctor wasn't just the best Doctor because he was Tom Baker;
he was the best Doctor because of his relationship with Sarah Jane.

On Twitter last night, the top three trending topics were all to do with
her passing, and Mitch
Benn commented that the last time he'd seen an outpouring of emotion
on anything like this scale was when Michael Jackson died. I have to say
that, frankly, I think Ms Sladen had a far greater effect on my life than
the Gloved One. I was delighted when her character reappeared on Dr Who,
complete with K-9 during David Tennant's stint - and her spinoff series
The Sarah Jane Adventures was one of the best things on children's telly
in many years. Most of all, though, the reactions of people to her death
have all focused on what a lovely person she was. Wherever she is, I hope
she knows how much we are all going to miss her.

WARMING UP

I've got the patio door open and there is a wren singing extraordinarily
loudly somewhere close by in the garden. There are two collared doves
sitting on the bird table, hoovering up the seed that falls from the sparrows
attacking the bird feeder above them. It's another lovely day here in
the south west, the sun is shining brightly, and I don't feel too bad
at all. Britain is basking in a spell of gloriously warm weather and it
feels good - as if winter is finally losing its grip on my mood.

I've been working at home today, which always tends to brighten my outlook,
and I have just one more day to work this week. Unfortunately tomorrow
will involve something on the order of four hours in a car travelling
to and from meetings, but once I get home that's it for a whole four days.
I am really looking forwards to the break. I might even dig the barbecue
out of the garage...

I really enjoyed the Helvetica film. I found it fascinating, although
if I'm honest I'd have liked it even more if they'd put in a bit more
technical information. There were plenty of shots of computer screens
and drawings of letters that passed without explanation. On the other
hand, I'm a bit of an anorak about such things and I suspect that if the
director had decided to explain such things, it might come across
as being a trifle pedantic. An extra on the fundamental characteristics
and construction of type would have been nice, though.

It was lovely to see the very sprightly Hermann
Zapf talking about his work, and Neville
Brody was fascinating. But the person who made the biggest impression
on me was Professor Erik Spiekermann,
whose devotion to type is wonderfully
apparent in the extras: "I will not read anything unless I've
identified the typeface." I found myself nodding in agreement with
just about everything he said - sadly, even down to problems with failing
eyesight. Elsewhere, the film also echoes a problem that I have with a
lot of modern design: the abandonment of the rules and systems developed
over centuries means that "designers who used to be incompetent can
now fit right in." I couldn't have put it better myself.

OUT OF SORTS

I've managed to do a little writing over the last 48 hours or so and
I've got the basic shape of a couple of short stories thrashed out. The
trouble is I really don't feel like sitting down and completing them.
Although I'm off the antidepressants (and have been since before Christmas)
I still have bleak spells and the last week or so has been difficult.

Although I feel a little better today, I'm still under the weather. I
spent a couple of hours this afternoon tidying up, which normally improves
my mood, but I still feel distracted and listless. The pot of tea and
a couple of hot cross buns I had just now have yet to perk me up so it's
time to step away from the keyboard for a while and go read a book, I
think. The stories can wait.

I've bowed to the inevitable and created the Headfirstonly
YouTube channel. There's only a handful of things on there at the
moment, as my rural broadband connection means it takes ages
to upload anything, but I'll add more stuff as time goes by. So far everything
I've posted was recorded with my Canon PowerShot rather than my camcorder
- the days of MiniDV tapes and firewire cables seem very far away now
that I can plug a card into my computer's reader and import stuff in seconds.
I might have a spin through some old stuff over the holidays and see if
there's anything amusing or interesting enough to warrant sharing.

CAN'T WAIT

William Shatner has announced the track and artist listing for his
upcoming
album, and it reads like a who's who of prog rock. Michael Schenker,
Steve Howe, Ian Paice, Johnny Winter, Ritchie Blackmore (Ritchie Blackmore!),
John Wetton and Edgar Froese are just some of the names that had my jaw
dropping to the floor. I really can't wait to hear the results.

AT LAST...

I ordered a copy of this documentary film last year, and the postman
has just delivered it. Yes, I'm a typography geek...

Making a movie about a font might seem a little unusual,
but Gary Hustwit's documentary
has been garnering enthusiasticreviews since
it came out in 2007 and the list
of people who appear in the movie reads like a history of type design
from the last hundred years. Time to fire up the TV!

Urgh. It's Monday again. Monday always comes as a nasty shock, but particularly
when I've had a very good weekend. The weather has been spectacularly
good over the last few days and I've taken the opportunity to get the
lawn cut, tidy up the garden, and go out for a walk with the camera. After
an early supper at the pub last night I even managed to get a good night's
sleep. It's just a pity that as far as Mondays are concerned, sleep never
lasts long enough. By half past two this afternoon I was yawning my head
off.

GO AND SEE...

Despite the good weather I spent a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon
sitting in a room with no windows. I was at the Wotton Electric
Picture House to see Gore Verbinski's Rango.
I knew next to nothing about the film - I'd not seen any clips, I'd avoided
all of the trailers apart from the initial teaser that featured a clockwork
fish slowly making its way across the screen, and the only thing I would
have been able to tell you about it was that the studio wanted to convert
it retrospectively to 3D, but Verbinski wouldn't let them. I'm glad I
went in knowing next to nothing, as it made just about every scene a delight.
It's the first animated film from Industrial
Light and Magic, and on this showing Pixar had better start raising
their game. It's as if the folks at ILM said "Okay Pixar, you think
you can do convincing water? You think that looks like fire? You think
your particle systems
are man enough for this?"

There's lots
of intereston
the web at the moment over a
paper submitted by a team studying particle physics with Fermilab's
Tevatron collider in
Batavia, Illinois (just west of Chicago.) The Tevatron works on the same
principle as the Large Hadron Collider
- you accelerate atomic particles up to huge speeds using two rings of
magnets several kilometres across, so that the particles in one ring travel
in the opposite direction to the particles in the other ring; when your
particles are going as fast as you can make them, you make the two rings
intersect. With luck, some of your particles will collide and get smashed
into smaller bits, and a set of detectors around the intersection point
will pick up the debris left over so you can figure out really interesting
stuff - like what atoms are made of or what the fundamental forces of
the Universe are.

The interest is occurring primarily because of a phrase used in the paper:

"We find a statistically significant disagreement with current theoretical
predictions."

That's one of the most exciting sentences you're likely
to read in any research paper, but when the paper is about particle physics,
things get really interesting. Physicists have something called the
Standard Model (SM) to describe the structure of matter and how some
of the fundamental forces of the universe (the electroweak
and strong
forces, but not gravity) interact with it. Up until now, the SM has been
pretty good at predicting what will happen when you smack stuff together
in colliders like the Tevatron.

The results obtained by the Fermilab team seem to indicate something
new, however. For a few hundred collisions of the many thousands they
observed, there is a noticeable bump which suggests that they're seeing
a particle with a mass of around 144 GeV/c^2 being produced and then almost
immediately decaying. A proton is about 1GeV/c^2, so whatever the Tevatron's
mystery particle is, it's about 150 times as heavy as a proton. The SM
has no answer for what it might be; the folks at the Tevatron don't know
what process was forming that particle, or what that particle was. It's
unlikely to be the elusive Higgs
boson, but that only makes things more interesting. There's
talk that a new fundamental force may be at work, and if that's the case
then at the very least the Fermilab paper is likely to be as important
a development in physics as Salam, Glashow and Weinberg's Nobel
prize winning work in the 1970s unifying the electromagnetic and weak
forces. I'll be watching this one with interest.

The thing is, people have always believed that the world was
about to end. Loren Madsen's pick
a year gathers together an intimidating (and somewhat depressing)
collection of those nutjob predictions in one handy reference guide. It's
well worth a read.

I love watching for meteors. I can still remember watching a fantastic
meteor swarm with my mother back in November 1998 during the Leonid shower
when several fireballs (meteors that appear brighter than the planet Venus)
were arriving every minute. Some of them were bright enough to cast shadows.
That was something truly special, a once-in-a-lifetime event. The Leonid
shower is just one of several meteor
showers that occur every year, and it's now known that these showers
happen when the Earth's orbit takes it through the trail of debris left
behind by a comet. In the case of the Leonids,
the comet in question is 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.

But you don't need to wait for one of the big showers to see shooting
stars. If you go outside after dark on a clear night at any time of year,
you stand a chance of seeing sporadic meteors - meteors that aren't associated
with a particular meteor shower like the Leonids. Sporadic meteors should
arrive more or less at random, but for the past 30 years or so, astronomers
have known that they
don't. Statistically, on any given night during the year (given a
site with a dark sky and no clouds, of course) you can expect to see ten
or so fireballs between dusk and dawn.

What's quite interesting is that in the spring, the rate of these fireballs
is 10% higher than at other times of year and as NASA's science news report
explains, this
is a little bit strange. In explaining why it's not what astronomers
expected, the article introduces a term I'd not come across before: "The
apex of Earth's way." It's the spot in the sky that Earth is moving
towards as it travels along its orbit round the Sun. As NASA explain,
you'd expect most sporadic meteors to come from that general direction
just as you'd expect most insects to hit the windscreen of your car as
you travel along a road. And for most sporadic meteors, this turns out
to be the case. However, the really interesting point is that the exceptionally
bright meteors seen every spring come from the opposite direction. Going
back to the windscreen analogy, it's like going on a long car trip and
finding when you arrive that all the really big bugs you hit
were splatted against the rear window of your car. As yet, nobody knows
why this happens. Fascinating!

FIREWORKS

For all its faults, TRON: Legacy was a
beautiful-looking film. Here's an article by Joshua Nimoy, one of the
guys responsible for the computer graphics explaining some of the
tech behind the visuals. (Found, as usual, via Kottke.)

MORE FIREWORKS

If you've ever had piano lessons, you'll probably remember being told
how important practice is. You might have been like me, and never really
took that fact to heart, considering it a chore when there were much more
interesting things to be done somewhere else. I've got back into playing
keyboards recently, and I really regret not being more committed to learning
when I was younger.

If only I could go back in time and show my younger self the
extraordinary Hiromi Uehara. If I'd known what mastery of the instrument
enabled you to do, and seen and heard exactly what being jaw-droppingly
good at playing was like, I suspect I might have been a little more serious
about my lessons and practice. Watching her rendition of I've
Got Rhythm gives me goosebumps.

Here in the UK, it's Mothers Day. This year for the first time I won't
be phoning my Mum up for a chat; it's been just over six months since
she died, and I still miss her terribly. I was surprised how upset I've
been over this past week, thanks mainly to adverts and emails advising
me not to forget to get her a present. As a result, I've found myself
cursing advertising executives as cynical, manipulative but thoughtless
dead-hearted bastards.

So, no change there, then.

SIMMERING

Vesper and Striv
both tweeted links this weekend to Boston.com's
latest set of Big Picture photographs, featuring the extraordinary
Nyiragongo Crater
in the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa. As I sat there
reading Boston.com's story, I came across a name that brought memories
of my childhood flooding back. That name was Haroun Tazieff:

I was given this copy of True Adventure Stories on Land when I was a
small child. As it has my home address in Stafford written inside the
front cover and the publishing date is 1968, I'd guess I would have been
around eight years old. It was - and still is - one of my favourite books,
which is why it's still in my collection. It's an odd work, though. There's
a credit on the frontispiece to the editor, Peter Grey, but there is no
information at all about who wrote the short stories the book contains,
which is a shame, because they're all gripping. The subject matter is
tailor-made to appeal to young boys and the tales range from the original
"hellfighter" himself, Myron
Kinley through Harry
H Dunn's adventures with Zapata, Heinrich
Schleimann's discovery of the lost city of Troy and a Mexican landowner
called José Graham battling against a horde of locusts, to the
exploits of the "modern day Robin Hood", Salvatore
Giuliano.

But it's the penultimate story in the book, "Crater of Death",
that held the most fascination for me. Let's face it, a title like that
is going to grab your attention when you're eight years old. The story
concerns Tazieff's adventures as he travelled to the Congo to investigate
and film a
new volcanic eruption, and describes his realisation that he would spend
the rest of his career not as an everyday geologist, but as a volcanologist.
And that's exactly what he did: pushing the field just about as close
to the edge as he possibly could, often walking up to the rim of an erupting
volcano to make recordings and take samples. It's rip-roaring stuff, and
it made a huge impression on me. Tazieff had a
long and eventful career and although he died
in 1998, seeing his name in an article can still take me back to my
boyhood and inspire a sense of adventure and excitement.

If you're interested in volcanoes, I'd recomment getting hold of Dr Iain
Stewart's series Earth:
The Power of the Planet. The episode on volcanoes includes a visit
to another shield volcano in Africa, this time the extraordinary Erta
Ale in Ethiopia. It's very similar to the Nyiragongo crater and the
timelapse footage of lava as it migrates from one side of the lake to
the other is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on television.
I was so impressed that I went out and bought
the series on Blu-ray. Dr Stewart is one of the best science presenters
on TV, too; his calm and thoughtful BBC
Horizon piece on the recent earthquake in Japan was one of the best
documentaries I've seen on TV for a very long time.